Netizen: Blogger

Showing posts with label Blogger. Show all posts

Wednesday, May 13, 2009

Content Is Queen, Marketing Is Princess

How do you market your blog posts?

https://twitter.com/growline/status/1773172868
David Risley: Confessions Of A Six Figure Blogger

(1) Search Engine Optimization

If you got a great blog, most of your traffic is going to come through search engines. Tags are important. External links are important. Hyperlinks are important. For all three these days you got Zemanta. Use it.

Great, regular content hence is also good marketing. Content is queen.

(2) Mailing List

Got to build a mailing list for your blog. The one that I started using for this blog is over 9,000 strong. I decided on it yesterday. And look what I got.

"My name is ______ and I graduated Columbia J School in 2008 where I concentrated in broadcast. I work at ABC News in DC now (the network) and I am working on this idea of Job Hunting and the Internet--pretty much exactly what you posted in your blog below. I am wondering if maybe we could talk on the phone about this idea."

One email a day, with five links to five blog posts: do you think that will work?

(3) Comments Sections Of Other Blogs

Like minded blogs. Celebrity blogs. If you are passionate about what you are passionate about, it is not possible you don't regularly read at least a dozen blogs that share your passion. Engage your favorite bloggers in their comments sections. Link to your blog from their comments sections. That helps jack up your Google rank. And that is a good thing.

JP, Confused Of Calcutta, is a big shot. I have never met him, but I think of him as a friend. He is CIO of British Telecom. I once came across a list in some magazine where Google CEO Eric Schmidt was number six, and JP was number 12. I really like his blog, that is why I visit his blog and participate in his comments sections. But that participation also jacks up my own blog's Google rank. I am not complaining.

I grew up watching Amitabh Bachchan. This here is me in 1993. Amitabh just so happens to be the most recognized face on the planet. His blog lets me interact with him and read his mind the way a handshake will not. In his comments sections, I have hope I will meet him one day. And, by the way, Amitabh was in Calcutta before he moved to Mumbai.

I am a New Yorker. I take pride in the New York Times. It is a good idea for me to leave comments in some of their blog's comments sections and hyperlink my name to my own blog.

I really like it that when I link to an article on the Google Blog, my blog shows up at the bottom of that post at the Google Blog. I am flattered, what can I say?

Mark Cuban is a loud mouth. I think that is a good thing for my blogging.

Huffington Post does Facebook and Mashable does Disqus. They don't make me create a separate account with them or fill up basic info before I can leave a comment. And they both have huge traffic. So it is a very good idea to participate in their comments sections. Read a post, then say what you have to say, and leave a link to one of your blog posts that might go with the theme. Or just leave a link to your blog.

And, by the way, Disqus is like Zemanta, a must have, also Add This. Also Google Analytics.

But primarily, you are looking to make friends in comments sections. Passionate bloggers with small traffic might have time for you. Get to know them.

Another way to figure out which comments sections to visit is by using Blogsearch. Make a blog post, then search the key term for your blog post. Relevant blog posts will show up. Read and comment and link back to your blog post. The weirdest part of the exercise though is that most blogs out there don't do Disqus, at least not yet. But the nice ones just ask for your name, email address, not to be published but required, they say, and website address. The not nice ones expect you to register with them. I almost always walk away when I see that red flag.

(4) Twitter Is A Versatile Broadcast Medium

Converting To The Mass Follow Formula On Twitter was a good decision. These two have been helping me expand my base: TopFollowed, MyTweetFollowers. And then you got SocialToo, Adjix, and TweetDeck.

The reason you want to follow everyone who follows you is because the Direct Message option is a great one. It is like a politician saying hello to you on the campaign trail. That is not shallow. He/she is not pretending to be family.

My Relationship With Ashton Kutcher

Twitterfeed is as grand as TweetDeck. Thanks to Twitterfeed, as of yesterday, my Netizen blog, this blog, BusinessWeek, CNet, and Digg will all feed my Twitter feed without me doing anything about it. Manual feeding is history.

(5) Facebook Notes

My blog is integrated with my Facebook account. So a new blog post shows up as a note in my Facebook stream. And I like to tag friends to those notes, so I show up in their Facebook stream as well. That is a fancy way of saying hello.

(6) Feeds

Don't allow feeds access to your full content. Give out the first paragraph. Let people show up at your blog if they want to see the whole thing.

Content Is Queen
Blogging: Monkey Business?
Blogging = Learning + Teaching + Churning + Entertaining
Spamming Om Malik
Digg Button, Twitter Button For Your Blog Posts
Blogging Several Times A Day
Blogging Tips
A Blogger Is Also An Editor
Blog Daily
Where Have You Placed Your Ads?
Sites That Pay You To Blog

Friday, April 17, 2009

Blogging Several Times A Day

For the past few days I have been blogging several times a day.

Blogging Tips
A Blogger Is Also An Editor
Blog Daily
Where Have You Placed Your Ads?
Sites That Pay You To Blog

April 17

My Relationship With Ashton Kutcher
The Human Is The Center Of Gravity In Computing
Blogging Several Times A Day
Visionary Entrepreneurs Will Recreate The World
That Plateau Feeling

April 16

Blogging Tips
0 Tweets, 30,000 Followers: Could That Be Oprah?
That StartUp Mentality (2)

April 15

That StartUp Mentality
A Blogger Is Also An Editor
Blog Daily
Where Have You Placed Your Ads?
Twitter Is Not Micro
Cupcake: Android 1.5

April 14

Skype: Hub
The Depth Of Your Friendships At Twitter
Goal: A Billion People On Twitter
Search Come Full Circle: That Human Element

The idea is to spill your stream of consciousness thoughts, ideas, perspectives into that collective stream. Curiously that also jacks up your blog's status with the search engines. Yesterday I googled up "sites that pay you to blog" and my post on the topic showed up in the top 10 results.

Sites That Pay You To Blog

It is almost as if for the past few days I have been spending more time blogging than tweeting. But then I discovered something else. When you download about four blog posts in a row into your Twitter stream, suddenly you get 10 new followers on Twitter. That is not like Oprah getting 50,000 new followers before her first tweet, but it is something. Like they say, it adds up, and it is organic growth.

0 Tweets, 30,000 Followers: Could That Be Oprah?

Thursday, April 16, 2009

Blogging Tips

Darren Rowse: How I Make Money Blogging

Image via Wikipedia

Seth Godin: How to Get Traffic to Your Blog
Rand Fiskin: 21 Tactics to Increase Blog Traffic
Skellie: 25 Paths to an Insanely Popular Blog
Yaro Starak: Why Don’t Bloggers Understand Email Marketing?
Maki: 6 Fool-Proof Steps to Make More Money With Your Website
Liz Strauss:

Chris Brogan:

Wednesday, April 15, 2009

Where Have You Placed Your Ads?

Image via Wikipedia

Until yesterday my ads were in the white zone, at the very bottom, and on the side bar in the middle. I had this if-you-build-it-they-will-come attitude. Once I start getting enough page hits, revenue will follow, that was my attitude. But the point is, ad placement works at all page hits levels.

I moved my ads to the orange zone only yesterday evening, and already my earnings have gone up by a factor of four, and I am only half way through the day.

I made two major changes on my three primary blogs yesterday.

For now Nepal and Barackface have the most blog posts, but now my primary blog is Netizen.

I used to have only one blog post per page. Now I have three blog posts per page.
Now I have ads at the bottom of each blog post. That also ends up being ads at the top of two blog posts. So I have one in the orange zone, and two in the red zone now. And that has made a huge difference.

A less cluttered side bar also makes a blog more user friendly. And the footer now only has a search engine. That makes the blogs look cleaner.

And all this was very easy to do. For those of you familiar with the Blogger dashboard, click on "Layout." Then click on "Page Elements." Go to the box called "Blog Posts." Click on "Edit." There you can decide you want three posts per page and that you want to "Show Ads Between Posts." Google only allows for three ads per page, so three posts per page is a good number.

Because I now have three posts per page, now I don't feel the pressure to write particularly long posts. And so yesterday I had the busiest day ever at Netizen measured by the number of posts. So ad placement is not the only reason the earnings today are so much higher.

And yesterday I wrote my first blog post advertisement: Advanced Global Materials. Google makes money from ads, so can I. It is a problem only if all your posts at your blog are blog post ads. But as long as you maintain a healthy ratio between your regular posts, and your ad posts, and you clearly state at the bottom of a post that it is an ad, I think you are okay. (Sites That Pay You To Blog)

Like Deng Xiaoping said, to make money is a good thing.

Sunday, April 12, 2009

Sites That Pay You To Blog

Image via CrunchBase

26 Sites That Pay You to Blog | How-To
Sites That Pay You to Blog
5 sites that pay you to blog! | Senserely Yours, | AdSense community
26 Sites That Pay You to Blog - Blog Forum - Bloggeries
Blog Sponsored Reviews - 5 Sites That Pay You To Blog Through Blog ...
Million Blog: Blog Advertising and Websites that pay you to blog
Sites That Pay You To Blog | Blogging, SEO and Online Marketing Tips
10 Sites that pay you to blog! | Black Hat CEO
best sites that pay you to blog | Tycoon Blogger
List Of Sites That Pay You To Blog

I did a google search on "sites that pay you to blog" and these are the first 10 results that showed up. Before that I had visited result number one on my own. But it felt to me like it was hard to separate the wheat from the chaff. And I did not want to have to visit every suggested site and see for myself. How do you see for yourself? Do you register and participate and see if it works? So this is what I proceeded to do. I made a list of all the sites mentioned in these 10 blog posts/articles. The more often a site has been mentioned, the higher its ranking. Then I visited all the sites to weed out three dead links I found. These are in alphabetical order.

http://451press.com 3 Mentions
http://www.associatedcontent.com 1 Mention
http://www.b5media.com 4 Mentions
http://beaguide.about.com 2 Mentions
http://www.blogburner.com 4 Mentions

http://bloggertizer.com 3 Mentions
http://bloggerwave.com 5 Mentions
http://www.bloggingads.com 3 Mentions
http://www.blogcharm.com 1 Mention
http://www.blogitive.com 7 Mentions
http://blogpayz.com 1 Mention
http://www.blogsvertise.com 8 Mentions
http://www.blogtoprofit.com 4 Mentions
http://botwmedia.com 1 Mention
http://www.buyablogger.com 1 Mention
http://www.buyblogreviews.com 2 Mentions
http://www.cashtalk.org 1 Mention
http://www.ciao.co.uk/reg.php 1 Mention
http://contextual.v7n.com/join.php 1 Mention

http://bloggerwave.com 5 Mentions

http://www.blogitive.com 7 Mentions

http://www.blogsvertise.com 8 Mentions

http://loudlaunch.com 6 Mentions

http://payperpost.com 10 Mentions

http://www.reviewme.com 8 Mentions

http://www.smorty.com 7 Mentions

http://sponsoredreviews.com 6 Mentions

http://www.weblogsinc.com 5 Mentions

Top 5

http://payperpost.com 10 Mentions

http://www.blogsvertise.com 8 Mentions

http://www.reviewme.com 8 Mentions

http://www.blogitive.com 7 Mentions
http://www.smorty.com 7 Mentions

Mind you, I have not had the chance to cross check them. I took them at their word as to what they were offering. And I have shared. If a few of these are scams, don't blame me. If some of them do no better for you than if you ran AdSense ads on your own, don't blame me. If some of them work wonders for you, don't give me credit.

And this popularity contest is flawed. I visited only a few of those, but the best so far to my mind was:

http://beaguide.about.com 2 Mentions

It is very hard to get in, but I went ahead and applied. They take four to eight weeks to get back with you. Their top earners make over $100,000 a year. About.com is a New York Times company.

How do you do well at blogging?

You have to be a good writer.
You have to have expertise.
You have to be passionate about your expertise.
You have to be able to attract readers.

Some will argue if you are a really good blogger, all you need is these three Google properties.

http://www.blogger.com
https://www.google.com/adsense
http://blogsearch.google.com

You blog, you post ads, and you go engage with other like-minded bloggers in their comments sections.

Don't get fooled. Blogging for a living is kind of like doing stand-up comedy for a living. It is very hard. Most people who try don't make it. Many people are happy just being able to do it on the side as part timers.

Think about it. All these sites are businesses. They are in it to make money. And you are going to help them make money. Most of them are out to act middle people between bloggers and advertisers.

The top authority on how to make money blogging is this guy in Australia:

http://www.problogger.net

He makes big money blogging. His tip: Adsense alone will not cut it, although it will end up your top earner.

And then there are those who say forget ads. Your blog is your business card. It helps you sell you if you have a skill to sell:

How I made over $2 million with this blog (Scripting News)

Also see: Home Based Business Opportunities Favorite, Find Out What Is The Best Program To Help You Make Blogging Money

How to Make Money Online for Beginners
Make Money Online
Make Money Online | Make Money At Home With A 13-Year Old
Make Money Online (Without Spending a Dime)
make money online Tag Page
2 Sure-fire Ways to Make Money Online — Pearsonified
How To Make Money Online - Forbes.com Fifteen billion smackers: That's the value Microsoft recently slapped on Facebook when the computer giant invested $240 million for a 1.6% stake in Mark Zuckerberg's online social-networking site. You could seethe with envy--or you could chase your own fortune on the Web. ....... Craigslist is another take on this model: The 25-person company, worth a reported $2 billion ....... Total page views per month: about 5 billion. ..... every pajama-clad blogger's dream: producing content supported by advertising dollars ........ To have any prayer of attracting large advertisers, sites need to attract at least 500,000 unique visitors per month ...... even if you do generate enough traffic, the "click-through" rates on ads tend to be quite low--in the neighborhood of one half of 1%. ...... Sure, you can make money online. But no one said it was easy.
Internet Marketing and Making Money Online | Dosh Dosh
Make Money Online
Make Money Online

Thursday, January 29, 2009

Plenty Of Fish: Online Dating King

AdSense Millionaire, alternate name for this blog post

PlentyOfFish.com
Markus Frind, CEO of Plenty Of Fish, Blog

How I Started A Dating Empire by Markus Frind By the end of March my site went viral and started growing 2 to 5% a day and it was off to the races from there...... made a whole $5.63 cents my first month, but that was more then enough for me to realize that I wouldn't go broke running the site and I could make a business out of this with enough traffic. ...... I refused to accept defeat of any kind, and I constantly forced myself to test new things. ...... When 2004 rolled around and word of mouth REALLY kicked in and as they say the rest is history. .... I look back now at how ill prepared I was, I didn't know anything about SEO, Advertising, community and I didn't even know what Venture Capital was. Just goes to show you anyone can do anything.

Plenty Of Fish is my idea of a budding Web 5.0 company. (Defining Web 4.0) The fact that it does not have sexy looking 2.0 software, just something barebones, makes it a bigger candidate for 5.0. I am a fan of the site. I am a user. Finding dates is not easy, online or off. Finding The Person is harder. Creating a relationship is not something an online dating site can do for you. But a site like Plenty Of Fish takes some of the unnecessary frills away. Who you like might not like you, who likes you you might not like. In online dating that can be quite painless. Next. Overtures are plentiful. Rejections come by the truckload. You might get an occasional date, a first date but no second date, an email conversations, a chat, no phone number. Race and class issues do come into play, just like offline. Chemistry and communication issues come into play. And ultimately online dating is not really offline. You are trying to get an offline date. Just that you are trying to get that online. But the stats look good. 800,000 relationships per year. That is good.

The business model is fascinating. I have long dreamed of a free online dating site, a Craig's List style site. And this is it. I am excited aboot Plenty Of Fish the way I am excited about Facebook, the way I am excited about Gmail and Blogger and YouTube.

Markus Frind, you got something going on.

The site could just grow and grow and grow. It could keep performing the same basic functions and just keep adding more and more people all over the world. And it could also keep improving its basic algorithms. The profiles you browse through helps the site determine what kind of profiles to show you.

How PlentyOfFish Conquered Online Dating Inc. serving up 1.6 billion webpages each month. ..... Plenty of Fish is on track to book revenue of $10 million for 2008, with profit margins in excess of 50 percent. Then, six minutes and 38 seconds after beginning his workday, Frind closes his Web browser and announces, "All done." ...... unknown and undistinguished. He hasn't gone to MIT, Stanford, or any other four-year college for that matter ....... bouncing, aimlessly, from job to job, but he is secretly ambitious. He builds his company by himself and from his apartment. ....... Frind takes it easy, working no more than 20 hours a week during the busiest times and usually no more than 10. Five years later, he is running one of the largest websites on the planet and paying himself more than $5 million a year. ........ Quiet, soft-featured, and ordinary looking, he is the kind of person who can get lost in a roomful of people ......... introverted, smart, and a little awkward. "Markus is one of those engineers who is just more comfortable sitting in front of a computer than he is talking to someone face to face" ......... Frind can be disarmingly frank, delivering vitriolic quips with a self-assured cheerfulness that feels almost mean. Yahoo (NASDAQ:YHOO), he says, is "a complete joke," Google (NASDAQ:GOOG) is "a cult," and Match is "dying." ........ the 23 hours a day in which he doesn't work ........ most comfortable with the world at arm's length. "He never raises his voice," Kanciar says later. "And he doesn't like conflict." ......... prefers to remain a silent observer of others ...... seems perpetually lost in thought ......... In a way, he's thinking about the company all the time. ........ a lonely childhood ....... graduating from a technical school in 1999 with a two-year degree in computer programming ...... got a job at an online shopping mall. Then, the dot-com bubble burst, and he spent the next two years bouncing from failed start-up to failing start-up. ........ For most of 2002, he was unemployed. ....... When he did have work, it felt like torture. His fellow engineers seemed to be writing deliberately inscrutable code in order to protect their jobs. ............ cleaning up other people's messes taught Frind how to quickly simplify complex code. In his spare time, he started working on a piece of software that was designed to find prime numbers in arithmetic progression. ......... He finished the hobby project in 2002, and, two years later, his program discovered a string of 23 prime numbers, the longest ever. (Frind's record has since been surpassed, but not before it was cited by UCLA mathematician and Fields Medal winner Terence Tao.) ......... would devote a couple of weeks to mastering Microsoft's new tool for building websites, ASP.net, and he would do it by building the hardest kind of website he could think of. .......... Online dating was an inspired choice. Not only does the act of building an intricate web of electronic winks, smiles, and nudges require significant programming skills ...... Hot or Not was acquired for $20 million in cash ......... Working a few hours an evening for two weeks, Frind built a crude dating site, which he named Plenty of Fish. It was desperately simple -- just an unadorned list of plain-text personals ads. But it promised something that no big dating company offered: free. ........... Rather than try to compete directly with Match, the industry leader, he created a website that cost almost nothing to run ......... Even better, he had created a perfect place for paid dating sites to spend their huge advertising budgets. ........ a picture of determination and naiveté. ........ From March to November 2003, his site expanded from 40 members to 10,000. Frind used his home computer as a Web server -- an unusual but cost-effective choice -- and spent his time trying to game Google with the tricks he picked up on the forums. In July, Google introduced a free tool called AdSense, which allowed small companies to automatically sell advertisements and display them on their websites. Frind made just $5 in his first month, but by the end of the year, he was making more than $3,300 a month .......... Frind has few friends in business, no mentors, and no investors. ............. Websites that venture capitalists would have spent tens of millions of dollars building in 1998 can now be started with tens of dollars. ............. has stayed simple, cheap, and lean even as his revenue and profits have grown ....... Plenty of Fish is a designer's nightmare; at once minimalist and inelegant ........ "I don't listen to the users," he says. "The people who suggest things are the vocal minority who have stupid ideas that only apply to their little niches." ........... When a member starts browsing through profiles, the site records his or her preferences and then narrows down its 10 million users to a more manageable group of potential mates. ......... the site creates 800,000 successful relationships a year. .......... almost no staff ....... been able to run a massive database with almost no computer hardware ......... the social news site Digg generates about 250 million page views each month, or roughly one-sixth of Plenty of Fish's monthly traffic, and employs 80 people. Most websites as busy as Frind's use hundreds of servers. Frind has just eight. ............ comes from writing efficient code ....... Frind approaches business in much the same way. "It's a strategy game," he says. "You're trying to take over the world, one country at a time." .......... "I spent every waking minute when I wasn't at my day job reading, studying, and learning. ....... returned to one of his old Internet hangouts, a forum called WebmasterWorld, and posted a brief how-to guide entitled "How I Made a Million in Three Months." It contained a blueprint for the success of Plenty of Fish: Pick a market in which the competition charges money for its service, build a lean operation with a "dead simple" free website, and pay for it using Google AdSense. ............ By 2006, Plenty of Fish was serving 200 million pages each month ....... $10,000 a day through AdSense ........ "He came out of nowhere, and he didn't seem to give a shit" ............ the stunt worked. Frind's site was the talk of the blogosphere, driving gobs of new users to the site. Plenty of Fish's growth accelerated dramatically, hitting one billion page views a month by 2007. .......... He still hadn't figured out how to get e-mail on his cell phone. ........ a guy who works an hour a day, who doesn't travel much, and who doesn't have any hobbies beyond war games .......... an aversion to doing harm can be more valuable than an overeagerness for self-improvement.

How I started A Dating Empire « The Paradigm Shift
Looking To Acquire I’m letting hundreds of millions of dollars in revenues slip through my fingers every year by sending people to competitors sites. ..... paid sites are currently consolidating and the growth for the industry is flat ...... I think there is a lot of opportunity right now and a opening to create a major paid site right now.

Special Report: Angel Investing 2009

Thursday, June 21, 2007

Money For Yahoo And Money For Google

Yahoo

Yahoo wins on the sticky factor. Yahoo visitors linger around longer. And so the Yahoo properties are better suited for ads that are dedicated to building brand names rather than pay per click text ads. Image ads are the answer for Yahoo. It might even have an edge for video ads. And video ads will be big money.

Yahoo is not anywhere near to beating Google on search. Google's search is an invention. Yahoo should keep at it, but it might be wiser to augment its strengths, and it does have those.

Semel is and has been an old media guy. He had a wonderful career during the pre dot com era. The guy is outstanding. But he did dampen innovation. He just did not "get it."

Jerry Yang might not be an MBA, but he has the instincts of a pioneer. He knows what it means to keep sniffing at the cutting edge.

Yahoo was hot property when Google was a non entity. Yahoo was so big and Google so small, Yahoo actually invested in a startup called Google. Yahoo back then did not foresee the Google potential, or they would not have passed on the opportunity to buy Google. That was years before Google offered text ads that have been minting gobbles of money.

In short, Yahoo is better suited for image and video ads. Google will continue with its edge on text ads.

And Yahoo Mail, that needs a major facelift. Make it easier to fight spam, danggoneit.

Google

Google needs to do two things fast it can.

One, figure out a way to add a two second ad at the end of the video clips on YouTube. It is like when you blog at Google's Blogger, placing text ads on the property is so easy. It should be that easy for users to monetize their original videos. But the ads should not distract. They should not be a 30 second video in the middle. Rather an image ad at the end.

Marry Blogger to mathematics. Make it possible to put down equations easily. Do calculations. The property will go up in value for that.

In The News

How Yahoo can catch Google San Jose Mercury News Compared with most companies, Yahoo is in good shape. But Yahoo's problem is that it's compared with Google, one of the fastest-growing and most profitable companies in the world. ..... more popular products that keep people on its site longer than any other property on the Web ....... Yahoo shouldn't try to out-Google Google ..... collection of highly popular Web sites and services ..... his company's uncanny ability to identify Internet services that resonate with ordinary Americans ..... Google has been earning 12 cents a search, compared with 8 cents for Yahoo. ..... uses math to figure out which ads are likely to get clicked on by Internet users, and it places them in the most prominent positions ....... Yahoo grew revenue a respectable 22 percent from 2005 to 2006, from $5.3 billion to $6.4 billion. But Google grew 73 percent from $6.1 billion to $10.6 billion. ..... he said Yahoo could still be No. 1 in search. "We need to figure out how to differentiate, and the way the current search game is being defined is not being defined by us." ...... average Internet users spend more than 11 minutes each time they visit Yahoo, compared with less than six minutes for Google and less than four minutes for Microsoft. ..... "They have the strongest reach and engagement on the Internet" ...... Yahoo's data on users could bring success during the next phase of the Internet, which he believes will include highly targeted, individualized advertising. ...... "Just like any other company, Google is going to mature and decline," Rafer said. "What comes after search advertising? You can beat your head against the wall. Or you can plan for the future for when Google is a one-trick pony."
Google's Iowa arrival should bring investment, jobs UI The Daily Iowan (subscription) create 200 jobs ..... an average salary of $50,000 each .... will pay the state an estimated $65 million in property taxes over the next 15 years. ..... combat Iowa's brain drain issue.

Sunday, December 03, 2006

Google Books: Primitive

Google Scholar
Google Books

Have you tried to go through the books? They have tried their best to give you the "book" experience. You turn over the page. The dirty white look is there. The whole nine yards.

I understand these are books only available in print format. So you are doing the best you can, fine. But if you can scan the words, maybe you can present them like regular webpages.

Or maybe have two versions. One would be what you have. Another would be for new authors, new books. Say you are an author, and you wrote a college textbook for Physics 101. You don't want to go to any publisher. Instead you want it directly published online. Instead of a blog, you have a book. So the presentation will have to be different. I mean, you can tweak the current blog templates, and you can alread do that, but it is still too tech-heavy, not still author friendly.

An author should be able to sign up and publish easy. The process should be as simple as possible, with as few steps as possible. The difference between Geocities and Blogger is not that much, technically speaking, but for the average user it is huge. Similarly, Google Books should offer an option that makes it super easy for authors to go online on a lookout for a global audience.

The end products should look like a webpage, navigable, searchable, with ads that make money for authors. Google should perhaps tweak its ad offerings to make it better for book authors, perhaps a 70-30 split in favor of the author.

You could take the book reading experience to a whole different level. If you are a reader who is signed in, you should be able to highlight through the books, online. You should be able to save books in your account, books you might want to read later, you should be able to bookmark to the point you have read.

Is there technology that would make it not possible to copy more than 100 words at a time? Or give the authors the option to turn off the copy feature altogether?

The technology is already there. We just got to make the leap.

Produce books that look like webpages, not like old books. Make navigation webby, not bookey. Let new authors bypass the whole publishing mechanism. Let them have total control. Not all will be read as widely, but let anyone publish.

In The News

Will Apple Ditch the iPod? Motley Fool
Notebooks Poised to Surge Ahead of Desktops in '07 DailyTech
Video, Software Enhancements Mark Cisco Conference PC Magazine
Nasdaq Threatens to Delist Dell SDA Asia Magazine
Have You Seen? Google Start Page Now Bundled With Dell PCs Web Host Industry Review
Hewlett-Packard gets 5-year postal service pact extension MarketWatch
January Set As 'Month Of Apple Bugs' InformationWeek
Intel Develops E-Quran, Saudi E-Curriculum Tech2
Intel Chairman unveils Egypt's first 'Digital Village' ZDNetIndia
Ericsson buys Redback to challenge Cisco Register
Review: ThinkFree Office Suite Attracts Users -- And Google InformationWeek
Google and Orange to create ’Google Phone’ mobile phone. OneCompare
Google's Latest Partnership Is Out of This World Motley Fool
Analyst Still Sees Rough Times For Yahoo! Forbes
Market Ratings Put Google on Top, Yahoo! Close Behind SDA Asia Magazine
IBM joins growing ranks in ending options for directors MarketWatch
IBM to End Stock Options for Directors Houston Chronicle
IBM to boost director retainer to $200,000 per year MarketWatch
Oracle: All Business, No Show Motley Fool
Oracle Offers New Licensing Model Baseline
Stench still hangs over Wal-Mart Chicago Sun-Times

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Google’s book-scanning efforts trigger philosophical debate Boston Herald, United States an alternative project promising better online access to the world’s books, art and historical documents. .... A splinter group called the Open Content Alliance favors a less restrictive approach to prevent mankind’s accumulated knowledge from being controlled by a commercial entity ....... the Open Content Alliance will not scan copyrighted content unless it receives the permission of the copyright owner. Most of the roughly 100,000 books that the alliance has scanned so far are works whose copyrights have expired. ..... The company will only acknowledge that it is scanning more than 3,000 books per day - a rate that translates into more than 1 million annually. Google also is footing a bill expected to exceed $100 million to make the digital copies - a commitment that appeals to many libraries. ...... None of Google’s contracts prevent participating libraries from making separate scanning arrangements with other organizations ..... Despite its ongoing support for the Open Content Alliance, Microsoft earlier this month launched a book-scanning project to compete with Google. ....... All but one of the libraries contributing content to Google so far are part of universities. They are: Harvard, Stanford, Michigan, Oxford, California, Virginia, Wisconsin-Madison, and Complutense of Madrid. The New York Public Library also is relying on Google to scan some of its books.
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